[wordup] Ayn Rand in Somalia: No government, but business is booming

[Adam Shand]

huh ... maybe there's hope for the world after all.  i doubt it ... but
maybe :)

From: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
Via:  politech at politechbot.com
URL   http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/05/maass.htm

Ayn Rand Comes to Somalia
In the absence of government bureaucracy and foreign aid, business is starting to boom
By Peter Maass
   ...

   Mogadishu has the closest thing to an Ayn Rand-style economy that the
   world has ever seen--no bureaucracy or regulation at all. The city has
   had no government since 1991, when the much despised President
   Mohammed Siad Barre was overthrown; his regime was replaced not by
   another one but by civil war. The northern regions of Somaliland and
   Puntland have stabilized under autonomous governments, but southern
   Somalia, with Mogadishu at its core, has remained a Mad Max zone
   carved up by warlords for whom fighting seems as necessary as oxygen.
   The prospect of stability is a curious miracle, not simply because the
   kind of business development that is happening tends to require the
   presence of a government, but because the very absence of a government
   may have helped to nurture an African oddity--a lean and efficient
   business sector that does not feed at a public trough controlled by
   corrupt officials.

   ...

   Of course, the lack of a government poses problems, especially with
   respect to the warlords. Sheikh and his fellow businessmen have kept
   them at bay by paying them protection money and by forming their own
   militias. Those manning the machine guns outside Telecom Somalia are
   employees of the company, and when the firm's linemen go out to lay
   new cables (they used to string overhead lines, but those got shot up
   by stray gunfire), they, too, are protected by company gunmen.
   All of this is costly, so the business leaders have taken steps to
   bring about a new government--one that will keep its hands out of
   their pockets and focus on providing security and public services.

   ...

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